January 15, 2015

Starting in the summer of 1982, Apple came into my life. With an Apple II+, an Epson MX-80 printer, and AppleWriter II, I was off to the races. Apple, the company, went on to consume a big chunk of my life. I dedicated over twenty years of my life to convincing people that using an Apple computer was the best way to have a productive relationship with technology and the data generated by it.

Even after my career at Apple ended in the summer of 2004, I continued to use Macs. Sometimes I was the only person using an Apple product at a meeting or even where I worked. As I have written, I think I managed to thrive while using Macs. I always felt that using a Mac kept the computer out of my way and let me get more things done.

For the last eleven years, I have been living in a multi-platform world. Sometimes it was because I wanted to and other times it was because I had to use something other than a Mac. Almost every day during those eleven years, I have spent time on a Windows computer and on a Mac. In addition on a majority of those days, I have also used a Linux computer.

I have come full circle and the company where I have worked for the last few years does most of its work on Macs. Apple was truly at the center of my digital life for many years. I used .Mac, iPhoto, iDVD, and even briefly tolerated iWeb. While never a real fan of iWorks or Apple's attempts at the cloud, I have been using both for years.

In a certain respect working for a Mac-centric company at this point in my life is unfortunate because I am as unhappy with Apple products as I can ever remember. The Apple platform now seems to get in my way so I am downsizing Apple's footprint in my life.

Having said that, this is in no way a rant again Apple or its products. It is more a list of what has pushed me to my decision and my first steps. I still have two Macs, but my reading of the tea leaves tells me that I am no longer one of the users that Apple targets. I do not have an iPhone or an iPad and my only iPod is an original one that I won from Apple for being manager of the year.

I am convinced that the best way to have a healthy relationship with technology is to keep Apple and its products on the edge of my digital life. I make heavy demands on my technology. Apple does not seem to be interested in power users on a budget.

On a more fundamental level, I am little upset that Apple shows little consistency in the treatment of my data. Perhaps the screen capture at the beginning of the post says it best. Today it is easier for me to work with a combination of Microsoft and Google products.

None of this means that Apple products will not work for you. If you love Macs, your iPhone, and iPad, and are happy with the direction of Cupertino, you probably do not need to read any further.

However, if you feeling a little pressured in the Apple world, you might take some comfort from where I am headed with this next series of posts.

That Apple no longer makes products which fit my needs is something I have suspected for a long tme. However I will now go a step further and say that Apple's software products are mostly uncompelling and while some like iCloud are slightly better, they still are not very capable. I cannot comment on Apple's intergration with their mobile products but I am pretty ticked off with iCloud being tied to Yosemite for Macs. Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox, and almost anyone you can name does a better job with the cloud than Apple.

Beyond that, Apple's lack of consistency, openness and compatibility in its applications is beyond frustrating. I have had it with the confusion and extra steps required because much of our company's earlier work is in iWorks 09 and Apple latest versions are not completely compatible. While iMovie is still probably the most capable free product out there, I really hate that I seem have to relearn it the few times a year that I make a movie.

The last straw is Apple's attempt to force me to Yosemite on my Mac Mini because I upgraded on my iMac. It is an extra irritant that even today's Microsoft would not try.

That iPhoto is scheduled for the chopping block only makes me feel good that I abandoned it long ago. That Aperture is gone confirms my decision to stick with Lightroom in spite of buying a copy of Aperture a few years ago. Much of what I am seeing could have been predicted by Apple's treatment of the content that I entrusted to it years ago with its dot Mac service. I lost many websites and still have photos with screwed up names because Apple's web tools renamed them beyond recognition.

When you use products side by side every day, you notice things that others might miss. My I5 MacMini was always slower and more problematic than my I5 Lenovo tower. That Windows remembers the last place I have looked saves me time and I find renaming files simpler on Windows. My Windows computer also connects more quickly to my new NAS. I have gotten used to Windows 8 and I expect the next version of Windows will be better. I no longer have that hope for OSX where I find search does not work like it should. I have one HP printer which I have installed multiple times on the Mac. It usually works for a few days and stops. It has never stopped working on the Windows computers in the house. All those things are nits, but they figure in making a technology decision.

Evaluating the technology that you are using and how it meets your needs is probably not something most people take seriously, but it is important to me. I take lots of photos, build websites, write books, and spend a lot of time writing or creating information about fiber networks.

As I wrote before the holidays in No Apple Under The Tree This Year, my wait for Apple to address its core computing markets is over. I took an important step during the holidays. I ended up ordering a 16GB Lenovo with a 2TB drive, DVD recorder, keyboard, and mouse for $800.79 tax included. I had planned to a 32GB model but they were sold out so I ordered the 16GB model with a couple of expansion slots for RAM. Even with buying the extra memory, I will still have a 32GB Lenovo system for around for $975. Fortunately Lenovo unlike Apple still believes that products should be upgradeable.

My plan is to move much of my non-work related computing to the Lenovo. Migrating from my I5 Lenovo was pretty easy. I signed into my Microsoft account and it moved all my mail, contact and printer settings over without any problems. Signing into my Chrome and Firefox browsers also moved over much that I had used on the old computer. I did end up installing Start8 which I have on my other Windows 8 computers. I also copied over a hidden folder from Postbox and let Postbox re index my inbox overnight. I use Postbox as a second mail client and a very powerful mail search engine.

Step two was signing up for the photographer's version of Adobe's Creative Cloud. This means that I will slowly migrate from Pixelmator on the Mac back to Photoshop. I was already using Lightroom so this just gives me the latest version. I never completely quit using Photoshop. I just had a very old version.

My MacMini with its almost full 500GB drive was part of the reason I bought the new Lenovo. There was not room to do much of my photographic work and keep all of my company work going. However, I got lucky on that and my son solved the storage problem for me. He gave me a Synology NAS that he is no longer using and a new Gig Ethernet switch. After getting it set up, I did a test copy of over 3,600 photos. The copy took less than two minutes.

I quickly freed up 15GBs of space on the MacMini. That gives me enough room to run my VMWare Fusion version of Ubuntu Linux once again. I'll probably do that until I have time to convert my old I5 Windows box into a Linux machine ether by way of VMWare or with a direct installation.

Having almost 11TBs of raid protected storage has made some decisions a lot easier. Today, I took down my I5 iMac running Yosemite. With more breathing room on the MacMini, I really don't need it and it is one less version of Pages and Keynote to worry about when working with files. I did not find Yosemite compelling.

If we can eventually move all our business work to the latest versions of Pages and Keynote, I can delete iWork 09 from my hard drive. That might not happen for a while based on the way the new versions of Pages are handling old Pages documents.

At this point, I have Office 365 on my Windows computers and Office 2011 on my MacMini. We were using the iCloud version of Pages to do joint editing of simple documents like press releases. That stopped yesterday when I found out that one of the sharing links led to a blank document. Fortunately I had a downloaded version of the document as a backup. I have never had that happen with Google drive which I used for almost all my ReadWrite articles.

Pictures will be handled on my Windows computer with Picasa and Lightroom. Most of writing for the web is handled with the browser version of Draft so can be done on either platform. Books will be done in Word and can also be done on either platform.

Most of my websites are WordPress based so that is also browser based. A few are created by RapidWeaver and some hand-coded with TextWrangler but I am confident the Mac can still handle that.

In sense my computing life is a flip-flop of what I often saw when selling Macs for Apple. In those days it was not unusual to see someone using a Mac at home for personal use and a Windows computer at work. For most of my personal things except a couple of websites, I will be using Windows. When I do work for our company, I will be using a Mac.

However, the Mac that I'll be using runs Postbox for mail, Chrome and Firefox for browsers. I will still use RapidWeaver, TextWrangler, and Fetch. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote will only figure in my day job. I offered my wife a MacBook Air for Christmas, but she chose a Chromebook. So far she is very happy with it. However other than battery life she also has few complaints about her five year old HP I5 laptop running Windows 7. It has been very reliable.

I thought about Apple's obession with no ports and no DVD drives as I stuck my TurboTax into the external DVD drive I had to buy for my MacMini. Good thing TurboTax comes in both Mac and Windows versions.

November 13, 2014

Reading a sampling of this week's articles about Apple heading into the enterprise brings to mind Yogi Berra's famous comment "It's like déjà vu all over again." As one Apple employee told me, we never stopped going after the enterprise.

There is a grain of truth in that as I will explain later, but if you read a few of this week's Apple enterprise articles, you will find that the newest Apple push is based on partnerships with other vendors and developers. When I see articles touting partnerships like the one with IBM, I have a hard time thinking beyond what a longtime Apple employee told me a few weeks ago. "You cannot say Apple and partnership in the same sentence."

The gospel according to Steve Jobs says that Apple is a consumer company which makes great products, some of which work very well in the enterprise.

My last few years at Apple I led what might have been Apple's most successful enterprise team. It was something of a skunk works project, but we did exceptionally well in one of the toughest enterprise markets in the world, the United States federal government. We had some high level support including Tim Cook, Bud Tribble, and Fred Anderson.

We were able to get operating system level implementations that made Apple products attractive to a number of agencies and especially to scientists who were tired of dealing with what at the time was a never-ending assault of viruses and malware. We got as far as getting OS X approved as part of the federal government's enterprise architecture. Apple did an OS level implementation of smart cards. Smart cards are requirement if you are going to do business with the federal government. A couple years after I left, they even published a manual about how to implement smart card services on your Mac.

Apple in 2000-2004 period championed CDSA, or Common Data Security Architecture, as the middle-ware building block for smart cards. The theory being it would be easier for everyone if security devices and providers across difference architectures wrote to the same middle-ware. I have not followed this closely but I know that you can still use smart cards with a Mac. However, Apple has switched how they do it all as of Yosemite and there are some questions as to Apple's direction with their security implementation.

With that as a background, here are my thoughts on Apple and the "new" enterprise push.

First Apple has done many enterprise pushes and perhaps all have shown some degree of success but the ill-fated attempt just after 2000 to get into the enterprise with iMac kiosks. The only thing thing that push accomplished was to get a lot of enterprise sales people fired.

Since the early nineties, all of Apple's enterprise sales pushes have had a few common characteristics.

Lots of strategy.

Few actual Apple feet on the street.

Apple has continued to go its own way.

I still remember the Apple-DEC alliance announced in 1988. Most of us selling to the enterprise hopped on a train and went to DEC Word in New York City. DEC was to provide the integration support and people to get Macs into the enterprise. I cannot remember any sales bump from the DEC alliance. Perhaps the third time alliance with IBM will be the charm.

In talking to Apple folks, the theory is that Apple is just building the hooks into OS software mostly iOS and that the enterprise folks are going to run with this on their own with help from IBM and a sales bump to Apple.

It is obvious that iPhones are doing well in American corporations. A new iPhone, much like a fancy Mac was in my days of selling at Apple, is a pretty nice corporate perk. iPhones are tied down more than the Android world so there is some appeal to the corporate IT folks.

However, there are some substantial cultural barriers at Apple.

As my example with smart cards illustrates, Apple often changes course for what seems to Apple like very good reasons. However, those changes are sometimes not communicated well and often the benefit is more in Apple's mind than to the customer who sometimes just wants things to work without having to jump through some new hoops.

Apple really does not know how to listen to customer needs. It used to be a big part of the company's culture before Steve came back. It disappeared then. If you saw the procedure Apple uses to determine what features make it into an OS release, you would have a hard time not laughing. I hope but doubt it has changed much.

Though the Yosemite Beta program is certainly a step in the right direction, I doubt we will see pre-release versions of iPhones being sent out to enterprises to make sure that new software and/or hardware does not break their software. Apple is built on surprise and secrets which are not favorites in the enterprise world.

Enterprises really like companies that keep working on something until they get it fixed. Apple would rather invent something new than fix something old. That is truly part of the company's DNA.

Enterprise sales are often built on long time relationships between executives and Apple does not do this well. One of our biggest challenges in selling to the federal government was that no Apple executive would say in public that the enterprise was important to Apple and that Apple would stick with its enterprise products. Beyond that Apple executives do not like to travel far beyond the safety of their offices in Cupertino. You have to make the pilgrimage to Cupertino. Enterprises want you to come to them. Unfortunately not enough comes out of Apple executive briefings to compensate for this Cupertino-centric approach.

The whole Xserve with the RAID product was supposed to a major push into the enterprise. They were great products but Apple had done little preparation for the selling and support of the products. They shipped the products, the field sort of figured out how to sell them and the diehard Apple customers helped us through the many product challenges. Apple actually did a training for the sales people after the Xserves had been selling and the people doing much of the training were the people in the field who had figured out the product's limitations. Apple was never willing to commit enough system engineer resourses to adequately support the products. Apple also made a major server architecture change to Intel. Changing processors pulled the rug out from under one of the largest Xserve customers who was using the Xserve product mostly because of the small heat footprint of its PowerPC processors. One might want to ask the VAR who got stuck with lots of outdated PowerPC Xserves about the reliability of Apple as a partner.

As to Apple listening to customers, I can still remember giving Tim Cook's Quicktime movies of enterprise customers talking about the difficulties they were having getting Macs to be good citizens on their Active Directory networks. After those made their way through the organization, I can remember Avie Tevanian flat out telling us that the customers did not know what they were talking about when they said Macs were not good Active Directory clients. In his mind there was no problem.

The solution to that problem was that I took one of my field system engineers and had him spend months writing an Active Directory plugin that got rolled into OS X. The employee is still writing OS software for Apple.

I was recently complaining to an Apple employee about all the incompatibilities between different versions of Pages. He assured me there were no problems. Yet I told him we live with problems almost on a daily basis because so much of our work over the years is in Pages 09 and there are always litle problems if we open the sixty page documents in newer versions. He said that Apple certainly did not expect enterprise employees to move to Pages but it was fine for small businesses. As someone in a small business, I might question that assessment.

Unfortunately the problem is not really Pages. It is Apple's attitude that it is okay to release a product that is not backwards compatible and then not even work at fixing it. If iPhoto can die for a "better" product, what changes might Apple spring on the enterprise just because it is going to make something better for Apple.

I am not holding up Microsoft as the perfect enterprise company, but the kind of we-are-going-to-fix-it attitude that took VISTA and made it into Windows 7 helps enterprise customers stay the course.

It is entirely possible that Apple's DNA has completely changed and this enterprise push will be the charm, but pardon me if I remain a skeptic for a couple of years.

As with most things Apple, time will tell better than any of us making guesses, but at least I have history on my side. That is my take on Apple and the enterprise from our spot which is almost as far as way from Cupertino as one can get and still be in the United States.

Our November Transformation at the coast is a much better prospect than hopping on an airplane and heading to one of the Apple Sales Conferences that are happening this time of year.

However, I will look forward to hearing how this new enterprise push is positioned internally. It should be entertaining.

October 31, 2014

With the latest operating system release, Yosemite, Apple is the closest it has been in a long time to figuring out the cloud. With the previous version of iCloud you could not actually see what files were in Apple’s cloud. You could also only save files from Apple apps and a few other App Store blessed apps. It was a strange way to run a cloud even for Apple.

Days before Yosemite’s release I heard rumors that you could see your files on iCloud using a Windows 7 or 8 device. That turned out to be only partially true, it would work but only if you also had an iOS 8 device. Since I am married to the map-happy world of Android that did me little good.

When Yosemite was released, I downloaded it and installed it on my backup Mac, my infamous iMac. I have been around long enough to not install a first round Apple operating system release on my production machine, but other than a couple of fonts that refuse to work and the things that I share from iPhoto disappearing into a black hole, the upgrade went almost as uneventfully my last triple upgrade a year ago.

What I really wanted to see with Yosemite was if Apple was truly making some progress in the cloud. It turned out that they are. It still has an Apple gotcha or two, but iCloud looks a lot more like a real cloud solution than it did a year ago.

I have uploaded and downloaded a variety of files from my Windows 7 & 8 machines and my Mac Mini running Mavericks. iCloud appears to work flawlessly on all of them assuming you don’t try to use Opera as your browser or try to save directly from Mavericks. When I do that, I still cannot see iCloud folders or find the file once I have saved it. It appears Apple does not want me to use anything on my Macs except Yosemite.

When I login from a browser, there are folders and I can see what is in the folders. The interface is slick. Uploading and downloading works well and seems speedy.

I was even surprised that I could get iCloud to work on Xubuntu Linux using Firefox. You can also easily email a file with your iCloud email account. If you are using Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, you can share a document. The iCloud options are only slightly less flexible than the ones you get from your Google Drive.

Options for Google Docs

One Drive, Box, and DropBox all have slightly different options. On DropBox and Box, you can set when a link to document expires. Box has some additional options as you can see.

For uploading and downloading documents, all of them, now including iCloud work very well. If you want to edit documents on the web, either iCloud or One Drive are pretty good options depending on your platform preference.

However, if you have an Android tablet or phone, you will be out of luck with iCloud. I could not get it to work on my original Kindle Fire or my Nexus tablet. I am actually a big fan of One Drive on my Android devices. I am able to access and see Word and Excel files without any problems.

iCloud is a workable solution for storing files and offers iPhone and iPad users some benefits that my ecosystem does not let me test.

There is only one complaint that I still have with iCloud. I can download files from iCloud to my ten year old dual G5 but I cannot upload them.

Somehow it seems like enabling uploading of files from an old computer would be more important than downloading files to it, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it since Dropbox works fine. I am just happy to have a ten year old computer that still boots and allows me to rummage around in the files once in a while.

So compliments to Apple on making some substantial progress with iCloud. Now if Apple would just figure out that supporting Android would not be the end of the world, a few of my friends who have Android and iPhone smartphones might be able to use iCloud instead of Dropbox.

October 03, 2014

Many people love Apple computer hardware. I think people who love Apple written software are a little harder to find. Sure there are people out there who still think OS X is Apple's gift to the world, but you will struggle to find someone singing the praises of Mail, Pages, Keynote, iPhoto or any of Apple's shrinking suite of computer software. I can say up front that I have said some nice things about Pages 5 but it is not a piece of software that I choose to use.

Part of the problem is that Apple introduces software and kills it off. The list goes back many years and includes software from Apple's application company Claris. Claris emailer was a good program as was Claris Works. Aperture was well thought of by some users and I was a fan of iDVD. All those programs are gone.

Then there is the iWork series that languished until recently when Apple brought out Pages 5 which creates all sorts of formatting problems when moving back and forth between it and Pages 09. People would not have to move back and forth if Apple had maintained feature parity with the old version.

Word might be bloated and not much fun to use, but it does a much better job moving between platforms and versions. Apple just does not seem to care.

I can perhaps buy the argument that Claris Emailer did not make sense for Claris when Apple decided to give away the Mail.app program. However, if that is the case then why isn't Apple's mail program a better program?

Perhaps you think it is, but I can assure you that it is not a program that you want to bet your company on these days.

While I admit to being an email program's worst nightmare with over a dozen email accounts, I long ago gave up pushing Mail.app. I only asked it to take care of five email accounts. One is a legacy Mobile Me account and aother is an iCloud account. The other three accounts were IMAP based accounts that I use in business.

I have been struggling for three or four months to trouble shoot a Mail.app problem on my Mac Mini. Before I detail the problem, it might help to understand my desktop. I have multiple computers at my fingertips including an iMac that is not pictured. In my office I run two Mac computers with OS 10.9.5, one desktop with Windows 8.1, and a laptop with Windows 7. I also have another laptop with Windows 8.1 that sits on our kitchen table downstairs. My MacMini also runs VMware Fusion and Xubuntu Linux.

In addition to all the computers (and you can read more at this article), I also once was a vice president at an email services company and spent plenty of time reviewing training materials telling people how to configure our email services on a variety of email clients. I also did some of our Linux and Mac compatibility testing.

There are not many email clients that I have not used over the years including Eudora and even Outlook on earlier versions of Windows. Having worked for years at Apple and after spending time at an email company, I believe email should be bullet proof. Even after I left our email company, I would sometimes call the company and ask them if they were having server problems when I noticed an email taking too long to be delivered. Each time I called, it was confirmed that they were experiencing some server problems.

So here is the email problem that has finally made me call it quits with Mail.app. One of my business email accounts will randomly will stop receiving emails and/or refuse to send emails. I have done everything to verify the settings are correct including deleting the account and starting over. Nothing helps except pivoting to another computer to send or receive the email. Mostly I just launch VMware Fusion and Thunderbird and send the copied and pasted text from Thunderbird running on Linux. It has never failed me.

I have also turned to my iMac and sent the email using the Mail.app running on it. It never has a problem sending the email. Of course I am also able to send using Windows Mail 8.1 which I quite like. Today I finally broke down an installed Postbox on my MacMini with the troublesome Mail.app. There was still an email from yesterday that my boss had sent and that Mail.app had refused to receive. Within minutes of entering the same settings into Postbox, I had the email from yesterday. It is also worth mentioning that my original Kindle Fire, my Nexus tablet, and Android smartphone all have no problem with the same email account.

I have done enough testing to conclude that Mail.app on this particular MacMini has a problem. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. Perhaps I could reintall Mail.app and fix the problem but it was easier to install Postbox because I get the added benefit of a mail search that actually works.

I was reminded of how well the Apple Mail program worked at one time when I booted up my trusted Dual G5 running OS 10.3.9. I personally like the older version of OS X, iPhoto, and Mail. Mail search actually found what I was looking for quickly. iPhoto let me use the escape key to move back from a picture to the library and the old version of OS X felt very comfortable. I was relieved to find the operating system actually remembered the last place I looked for files. It was also interesting that there was no Apple way to move some exported JPEG files from my old iPhoto to the cloud. I ended up using Dropbox which worked perfectly. Apple has proved time and again that it does not care even one tiny bit about my ten year old Mac.

Now I am not going to give up on Macs because of a flaky mail program, but Apple seems to be waging a war of attrition on serious computer users. iPhoto certainly is not the revolutionary program which I loved when it was first introduced. Even the iPhoned-version of it seems is falling out of favor. I actually quit depending on iPhoto over three years ago, I pull the plug on Apple's iPhoto at v 9.1.5. I moved to Picasa and Lightroom.

While I can make it run, I truly miss an up to date version of iDVD. Then there is iMovie. I just prepare to relearn the program every time that I use it. Apple's somewhat undeserved reputation of user interface consistency falls completely flat with iMovie. It seems to never be the same program. The formatting errors we find moving back and forth between versions of Pages are a huge hit to productivity. It takes a lot of time to correct them and we cannot find any font based issue that would cause the problems. Adobe got a lot of our company's money to make certain that was not the problem. In the end it is easier to switch over to Word to do a mail merge than fight with different versions of Pages.

Seriously if I am a Mac user in business, I seem to be stuck with Microsoft Office and what seems to be the declining interest of Apple in providing alternative software and services. I did not become a Mac user and go to work at Apple just so that I could have nice hardware to run Microsoft applications. I could write a whole post on how disappointed I am in iCloud. So many companies even Microsoft get the cloud close to right and Apple cannot even get into the ballpark.

I recently asked an Apple employee if Apple used any of their own software, the reply I got was that a handful of Pages documents have been sent out but never a Numbers document. I suspect Apple still uses Keynote, but that is not enough to keep a business user on the platform even if it were truly that much better than PowerPoint.

Perhaps Apple's software would get better if company policy dictated only Pages and Numbers documents sent from Mail.app.

I work for a company that uses Macs so I will continue to hope for innovative solutions like Postbox that make staying on the Apple platform a lot easier.

November 21, 2013

Macs have a long tradition of "just working." Windows stuff is often considered unreliable and unworkable by dedicated Mac users. Some of that is a myth and the reality is probably a little more complex.

In the world of businesses, WideOpen is a rarity, we are a Mac shop. While we have other platforms available, we do all of our proposals in Pages 09 and most of our work is done using Macs. I cheat a little since I handle most of my email correspondence from Thunderbird running in Xubuntu Linux which runs on VMware's Fusion 6 on my MacMini with 16GB of RAM.

One task that I tackled for WideOpen brought home the complexity of today's computing environment. We wanted to export some contacts from Highrise, which is a great cloud-based CRM solution that we use to stay in sync from multiple locations. Someone else had tried to get what we wanted out of Highrise and decided that there was no easy way to do it. That is when the old Mac guy, that would be me, got called in to look at the situation.

Moving contacts from one place to another has never been a favorite task of mine. The way Google handles contacts while not perfect has continued to keep me a fan of their platform. Apple's address book on the other hand has always been a little challenging when trying to get things in or out of it.

Our goal at WideOpen was to have the ability to print address labels for a limited set of contacts that we tagged in Highrise. It seems like a simple enough task but as might be expected getting the results we wanted gave us a few surprises.

I first hoped get a clean .csv file that would let me import the file into my Dymo LaserWriter 400 Turbo software's address book and print from my Windows 8.1 machine. I moved my label printer to my Windows desktop when my iMac died an untimedly death. I had so many early challenges with my MacMini that I never moved it back. Somehow I had managed to carry the old address book from my Mac over. I cannot remember how I did it and it now appears to not be very easy.

First off exporting as a .csv file from Highrise was not much fun since the platform has so many fields which are not needed in address label printing. If there is a way to choose what fields are exported, I have been unable to discover it.

After looking at the .csv file in Excel and trying a few things, I stumbled on the Highrise suggestion that I export my tagged contacts as a multiple-person vCard. I tried it and much to my surprise the contacts came over to my Mac address book. It showed as a Last Import and so I saved it as Smart Group with the name of First Mailing. I then printed it to my regular Brother HL-2270DW using a standard Avery Label format. It worked perfectly.

However, when I sent the instructions to my boss who has his Dymo Turbo LaserWriter label printer hooked to his Mac, the printer was not happy and screwed up the printing. It was late in the day so we gave up.

At dinner that evening, I wondered if my label printer was hooked to one of the very accessible front USB ports on my Lenovo tower or the hard to reach ports on the back. It did not take me long to wander up to my office that evening and discover the label printer was hooked to a front port. I unceremoniously unhooked it and plugged it into the USB port of the Mac keyboard on my Mac Mini. I added the new USB label printer, changed the page setting to Dymo and Address labels, and my test set of labels printed in under a minute.

The whole operation of switching the printer from my Windows computer to my Mac had taken less than five minutes. I was pretty excited and sent a screen shot of the settings to my boss.

When we talked the next morning, I found he had been unsuccessful in using my settings. Even after fooling with it for 45 minutes, he had not been able to get it to work. We have both been serious Mac users since 1984 so there probably little that I could have done in his situation to change the results. Our offices are six hours apart so he finally figured out that the Dymo software can be used with the Mac address book. However, there is a problem with tags in the Dymo software that makes it an imperfect solution. It will be an issue that will take more time than it deserves.

There was a time when Apple made everything from printers and scanners to cameras and almost all the software. There was also a time when the choices in the world of technology were limited. I started with an Apple II+, an Epson MX80, and AppleWriter II. There were not many other choices in those days. Making a few things work well is relatively easy. Making a lot of things work well is much harder. It has always been one of the reasons that the Windows world is more complex.

As Apple has moved to a company that does not make everything, things have become more complex like the Windows world. Back in October 2006, I bought an HP AIO printer and eventually got it working on my Mac and even my Linux computer using Ethernet.

Until this past summer, the HP AIO printer has worked fine on whatever Mac I used. However, when I upgraded to Mountain Lion, the printer would show up but the computer could never connect to it. The printer is on an Ethernet network and four Windows computers have no problem printing to it and they represent Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. When I upgraded to Mavericks the HP printer worked fine for two days on the network and then stopped again. I tried removing it and adding it back with no change in the problem. Finally I hooked it up using the USB port and everything is fine and the Windows computers still work via Ethernet.

There are mysteries in the computer world and sometimes they are just not worth solving. When I upgraded all three of my computer operating systems recently, the built-in SD card reader stopped working on my Lenovo Windows tower when I took it to Windows 8.1. I chose the easy way out, I just plugged in an external USB reader. That task, just like hooking up the HP printer by USB took seconds and figuring out either problem could take days.

February 15, 2013

This is the second part of a two
part series about how Windows users contemplating the shift to Windows 8 might
find the world of Apple if they choose to buy a Macintosh instead of upgrade to Windows 8. The first part
was on hardware. This piece covers
software, the “Cloud,” and a few other considerations.

While there are more cross
platform applications out there than there were a few years ago, the ones you
need, might not work the way you expect on a Mac. I am a big fan of SnagIt from Techsmith. It works well on both Macs and Windows. Yet there is one issue. While Snagit on Windows works with my
favorite cross-platform mail application, PostBox, it will
only work with Apple’s
Mail app on Mac OS X. I am not a fan of
Apple's Mail program. This kind of thing is one of those gotchas that can make moving to a new
platform irritating so you need to check apps that are important to you.

If you come over to Apple and end up using Apple’s iPhoto to manage your photos, you
might find some options gone for political reasons. Sharing is built in iPhoto for Facebook,
Flickr, and Twitter but not for Picasa web albums. Apple does not like Google
so you have to buy a third party plug-in or use a browser to get you photos
uploaded. iPhoto also creates a
proprietary library of your photos instead of just pointers to JPEGs. You could just switch to Picasa on the Mac,
but then there is no way to get your photos into Apple's iCloud without doing some scripting or
owning an iOS device.

One of the things you need
to accept when moving to Apple is that Apple wants you to do things a certain
way and deviating from the chosen path usually causes some sort of pain. That
is even the case in software.

If Microsoft Office is
your standard office suite, you likely know there is a new version out for
Windows Computers. I just subscribed to Office 365 for
$99 per year. The last version for the
Macintosh was released in 2011. While the files are supposed to move back and
forth without problems, my experience is that there are always a few little things
that do not work or there is an extra space here or there.

However, there is some
good news on the Office front for the Mac.
The latest update from Microsoft resulted in a dramatic speed increase
in loading the Office apps on my new Mac Mini.
That is good since no one is really sure when there will be a new Office for the Mac. The rumor that Microsoft might bring Office to Linux seems more promising than the
statement that no new Office is planned for the Mac.

The one other thing that I have noticed is that after using Office 365 a lot and moving back to Office on the Mac, I am having trouble finding things. I am a casual Office user so it might just reflect that, but it is enough of a problem that I now use Teamviewer to control my PC from the Mac so I can use Office 365 instead of Office 2011 on the Mac.

Beyond Office, even some
Mac users are questioning how much attention Apple is paying to their own
software. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (Apple's iWork suite of productivity apps) have not seen a major update in their desktop versions since 2009. Jason Grady writing for ZDNet
had the following comment.

“Instead Apple proceeds with
its release and abandon strategy. Release
iWork into the market with great fanfare and starve it until it eventually
dies. What makes matters worse is that Apple will not comment on its iWork
roadmap. Not even a 'we're working on it.' Nothing.”

Apple has even dropped
iDVD which makes sense inside the Apple world since Apple is moving away from
DVDs. However, many of us still use DVDs.
Tidbits which has been publishing information about
the Mac on the web and using Macs in their workflow for 22 years recently said of Apple,
“Apple
software —
from iOS 6 to Pages 4.3 — has been falling down. Great
hardware, increasingly sloppy software.”

If the “Cloud"
is important to you, you should be aware that Apple has struggled with its
vision for the Cloud. Apple has changed its Cloud strategy multiple times with
the result that many no longer trust Apple's with their data. Also Apple’s current iCloud implementation is
very different than other vendors' Clouds. It takes some getting used to and it
is hard to escape since it is built into the OS.

I still find there are some very good apps on the Mac. I use RapidWeaver for web development and Pixelmator for graphics. Sometimes I will write with Nisus Writer Express. It depends on my mood. As for utilities, Fetch is still my favorite FTP client.

Apple’s apps
and a few other applications like PIxelmator have the ability to save to iCloud if the software vendor has chosen to market their software through Apple's app store. However, even those other non-Apple apps which can save to Apple's iCloud save to
someplace invisible in Apple's iCloud.
You can find a hidden folder on your Mac which shows you what is there
but it takes some digging. You cannot see those files when you log into iCloud
with a browser like you can the iWork files. It is a weird concept.
Of course the apps know that the files are there but if you want to open the file with another app, you are out of luck. Apple just figures that there are
things you don't need to know or do. It is one of the things you need to accept if you plan to go to a Mac.

Beyond software, you need to consider setup. In spite of the Mac's reputation for ease of use. Setup on a new Mac can sometimes be not so easy as I found out. I have brought up a lot of Macs over the years and my most recent one was not any fun.

There is no doubt that Apple has an App store with far more software than Microsoft, but there is a downside to the app store. Apple's OS strategy
also revolves around that same App Store and my experience is
that it is a work in progress. In setting
up two new Windows 8 machines and my new Mac Mini, I found the Windows 8
machines required much less of my attention.
If you opt for a Mac and have even a decent Internet connection prepare
for some long downloads. I have TimeWarner cable and a 4.8 GB OS backup
download took eight hours. Most updates
you can have automatically applied but I still have to manually apply all the
ones from Microsoft for Office on the Mac.

You will find support and repair are not as accessible to Mac owners.

Using a Macintosh is great until something goes wrong and you will quickly find
that people who really know Macs are harder to find than knowledgeable Windows
people. If you live outside a major
metro area, be prepared to drive to the nearest Apple store for repair or face
to face support. There are far fewer Apple repair centers around than Windows
ones. It used to be the answer to most
Mac problems was reinstall the operating system. That is not as easy to do now
that install DVDs are gone. You can make one of your USB thumb drives a backup OS X installer, but my experience has shown that can have
some challenges. I had to buy third party software to create one for my Mac Mini.

Little things like navigating your computer will be different on the Mac.

When you are using a computer, the file system becomes very important. Do not
let someone convince you the Mac OS X Mountain Lion is more like Windows 7 than
Windows 8. I have used Macs for 28 years
and I find the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion the most confusing yet. It is
powerful and has a lot to like, but there is also a lot to learn. It has taken me just as long to get up to speed on it as it did for me to figure out Windows 8.

Apple decided with their
previous Lion release that the command "Save As" is not a good thing.
Some apps no longer have that command but now in Mountain Lion you can get it
back if you hold down the “option” key when you go to the file
menu. Still the new “Duplicate” and “Move”
commands can be confusing. Macs also do
not remember the last place you saved something like Windows. You can buy third party
software like Default Folder
X to fix that, but it is still not quite as easy to find
something on a Mac. Navigating around a Mac can be confusing especially when
Apple decides to hides important things like the user library.

There are some very neat things
on the Mac like AirDrop and AirPlay
which require other Macs or more Apple hardware like AppleTV before you enjoy them. Windows Media Center works pretty well with
existing Windows 7 machines so that is not too different since both platforms want you to stick with one platform.

The last worry is
security. I've used both platforms for over 8 years. Since MS introduced their
security program, that is the only security program I have used. I have had no
virus or worm problems on either platform, you just have to practice safe computing. At one time this was a huge advantage for the Mac. Now it is not so much.

All this boils down to a
move to the Mac will mean lots of changes especially in the way you view your
computer vendor. If you are coming to
the Mac, you need to believe Apple knows best or you will never be comfortable. Just like you cannot fight city hall, you likely will not be able to fight Apple. Is it any different in the Windows world. I would argue that Apple would not put up with an app like Start8 which brings back the old Windows Start Menu, but maybe I am wrong. They did relent a little on "Save As."

The Mac platform has some
great capabilities, but you will have to work to master them. The way you do things on a Mac is a little different. My conclusion is that
moving to Windows 8 is the best course for most Windows users. The learning
curve on the Mac is substantial for a Windows user. However, I encourage you to weigh what I have presented, talk to Mac users and make your own decision. Everyone's needs are different. What works for me, might not even fit your desk. :-)

However, for many Windows users it might just be easier to
stay the course with Windows and buy a new Windows 8 machine.

The simple addition of the $4.99 Start8 utility can make the Windows 8 experience a
lot like the old Windows. Once you have
done that, you can choose to ignore the parts of Windows 8 that don’t fit
the way you work.

I would not let anyone scare me away from Windows 8. I am not having any
trouble using it. I have it on two machines. One has a touch screen and the other has only a mouse. I am betting Microsoft will listen to customers and make it
better like they did with Vista.

Windows 8 is powerful and
very fast. When I boot both my Mac Mini
and Lenovo tower, even I if start the Mac Mini first, I usually have several
Windows applications launched before the Mac Mini even makes it to the desktop.

On my most recent startup,
I turned my Mac Mini on first. By the time the Mac Mini had gotten to the
desktop and launched Chrome, I had turned on the Windows 8 machine and launched the following programs on Windows
8.

Chrome

Firefox

SnagIt

Postbox (all my mail was
also retrieved)

Picasa

Excel

Word

Lightroom

Trillian

Opera

The Lenovo tower has 8 GBs
of RAM. The Mac Mini has 16 GBs of RAM.
Both systems have standard SATA hard drives and I5 processors.

February 10, 2013

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives. My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh. Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped. Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse. Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that. I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it. I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine. What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters. It is not a new question. I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read. I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked.

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off. There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP. Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company. It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway. It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue. I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs. It likely will not work. The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks. Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies. I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone. There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview. Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices. When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices. That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet. I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices. Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work. Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days. I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience. I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button. I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down.

In truth, it does not matter. I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom. Guess what? The "Escape key" works like it should there. A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

January 21, 2013

I took delivery of an I5 Mac Mini on Friday, January 11. The next night I finally called it quits with my problematic iMac, the iLemon. I opened my new Mac Mini’s box and began a strange journey. You can read a summary of my challenges setting up the Mac Mini on readwrite at "Mac Mini Tale of Woe Part Deux."

I actually think the Mac Mini is one of the best designed pieces of Apple hardware that I’ve seen in a while. In one respect that is great. It is good to know that Apple still knows how to design really good computers.

Unfortunately the process of setting up the Mac Mini and the software on the Mac Mini are not as good as the hardware deserves. It makes me question the current direction of Apple. Still I hope that some of the recent management changes will fix these problems. I would like to see Apple get back to the point where we can say, "Buy a Mac because it just works."

The crux of the matter is that Apple who is trying to convince us to throw away our CDs and DVDs has some bugs to work out in their new world of on-line software downloads.

Once I got my Mac Mini fully updated at the Apple App Store and it was not an automatic process, I wanted to download a copy of the Mac OS Lion 10.8.2 that the Apple App Store had just finished installing on my computer. That turned out to be impossible. The App Store insisted that the Mountain Lion it had just finished installing on my computer was not compatible and could not be downloaded.

Since the linked readwrite article was written a few days ago, I have continued to bang away at this technical issue. While I now have a very usable Mac Mini, I still do not have a downloaded copy of the version of Mac OS X 10.8.2 (build number 12C3104) which runs my Mac Mini.

I tried again to get a copy of Mt. Lion with the Mac Mini but I was still unable to download a copy of Mt. Lion. I then tried downloading a copy using my Mountain Lion external drive hooked to my iMac. Unfortunately the version that I got was the same version that was already on the external drive, build number 12C60. It took an amazing ten hours to download on our cable modem. I can usually download a full Linux ISO image in under ten minutes.

I got the suggestion from a knowledgeable friend at Apple to try forcing a restore to the external drive. That actually looked pretty promising for a while since it indicated that it was downloading some additional components. Unfortunately once it was finished it was still the same old build and the external drive still would not boot my Mac Mini.

Since then I have created a “Restore” USB drive and after buying another hard drive and using SuperDuper, I have cloned the hard drive that is the boot drive for the Mac Mini. I could not use SuperDuper just to clone the system to my old external drive since it formats the whole drive first. I also believe that the cloned drive has a “Restore” partition. When I get a chance I’ll have a look at it in terminal. I am beyond tired of fooling with it at this point. You cannot see the “Restore” partition using disktools. I am also using Time Capsule with the new external drive. In theory I should be fine.

Of more worry to me now that I have sort of solved the backup booting issue is that I have seen a few software errors and one iPhoto crash already with Mountain Lion. The most recent problem was a Time Capsule one. I have seen it three or four times while I was writing this article. Just after I set up the new Mac Mini, I also got an inconsistency warning for the new iPhone library that I created. The library only had a couple of days of photos. I made no attempt to bring most of my photos over.

None of these are huge issues individually, but they are things that I hoped to not see on a brand new computer which does not have any software that should cause problems. The disappointment started the moment the “UPDATE ALL” button did NOT work at the App Store. I had to go through the updates one after the other making sure that the iPhoto update was done last.

Updating the Mac Mini required my presence while, the two Windows 8 computers that I have brought up recently all magically did the updates by themselves.

Based on this experience I know there are some warts on the App Store. If you cannot download the software that you just installed on a computer, that is a serious problem. Maybe I’ll never have to deal with it, but my whole career at Apple which spanned nearly twenty years, I carried some sort of recovery disks with me.

I cannot believe this is saving Apple any money, and I would gladly pay $15 for a DVD with my OS on it. I think that is how much I paid for the last set that I got from HP. I actually don’t care if they are the latest and greatest disks as long as they will boot my computer. I would rather have a set of disks with 90% of the latest software than nothing at all. Surely downloading the 10% of new components would be more efficient than the ten hour download that I endured. I’ve been in a lot of hotels where there is no way you could get a long download done.

Anyway I still love my Mac Mini, and I hope Apple will solve this problem sooner rather than later. I don’t mind waiting for 10.8.3 to boot my Firewire External Drive now that I could boot via my USB drive if necessary. For those following the issue of iDVD (the reason I bought the Mac Mini) disappearing. I dug out my iLife 11 disks and installed iDVD on the new USB disk. I got strange warnings about an expired certificate, but I installed it anyway. I booted up with the USB drive and iDVD works fine which means I expect it will work fine when I can boot from my Firewire 800 drive which has my iDVD projects. How long iDVD will work is another question, but I should get at least another year out of it once my Firewire Drive gets updated. When I find an update that breaks iDVD, I just won't apply it to the Firewire drive. I will start evaluating replacements for iDVD as soon as I get a chance.

My Mac Mini is now front and center on my desk. You might have a hard time finding it, but it is driving the center screen (Xubuntu) and the Apple cinema display (OSX) to the right of it. The Mac Mini now sports 16 GBs of ram, 2 TB of external storage, and a Samsung DVD burner.

Given the challenges that I’ve had with Mountain Lion, I’m now doing most of my work on Xubuntu running on VMware’s Fusion product. As you can see from my desk, I have all the hardware that I need with an I5 Windows 8 tower to the left of me and an I7 Windows 7 Lenovo laptop to the right of me. My trusty old G5 is also hooked to the monitor of the Windows 8 tower so I can easily access it if need be. There also is another Linux box hiding on one of the tables under my Epson all in one ink jet printer. I can drive the old Pentium III Linux box from the center monitor if I need to, but I hope to donate it soon to an aspiring young programmer.

The Mac Mini didn’t end up being particularly cheap since I had to buy another external drive that I didn’t really need, but hopefully the investment which includes a Samsung DVD drive will be well worth it over time. I added a new LG LCD monitor but it took me a while to figure out that you can use a mini display port to DVI connector in the Thunderbolt port. Just that adapter from Apple was another $30 dollars.

I will leave everyone with one question. We now have four Windows computers in the house and one Mac Mini running Moutain Lion. My wife’s Windows 7 laptop and my Windows 8 Lenovo Yoga machine both have just 4 GBs of RAM and are I5 powered. I haven’t even considering upgrading the ram in either one of them because they are both very responsive. I am sometimes amazed by how much stuff I have open on the Yoga.

When I got the Mac Mini, it also just had 4 GBs of ram. I found it almost unusable. I am curious if anyone else has noticed that Mountain Lion seems to take a lot of ram compared to either Windows 7 or 8? I noticed the same thing on my iMac since it had 8 GBs of RAM which is the same that I have in my other Lenovo laptop. I blammed that on the flaky iMac. However, the Mac Mini has no excuse and wasn't much fun until it got some serious RAM.

December 28, 2012

It is funny how something you think you could not live without can slide to the point of not being nearly as indespensable as time passes.

I went to work for Apple in 1984 because the Macintosh inspired me. It let me do things that I could not do with other computers which in my case included my Apple IIe.

Over the years, I have done everything with my Macs from design newsletters to produce a DVD of my youngest daughter's prom. I have written thousands of articles using Macs. There are countless web pages that I created with one or other of the Macs which passed through our home. I don't even want to think of how many spreadsheets I built with Excel.

Spending four years selling real estate forced me to spend more time with Windows. Eventually I became impressed with Windows 7. I have dubbed it the most reliable operating system that I have ever used though I will have to give Ubuntu Linux a close second.

The last three Macs that I have purchased have not been ones that would help someone become a big Mac fan. I have stayed a Mac user in spite of my experience with them. My current iMac which I wrote about in an article entitled My iLemon on readwrite web is the kind of product that could turn anyone against a company.

Still I plan to continue using a Mac even though I have just gotten a new Windows 8 machine. It is interesting what no longer holds me to a Mac and what keeps me on the platform.

I have written two Kindle books this year. While much of the writing was done on the Mac, the final editing was done on Microsoft Word on Windows. I tried doing one book completely on the Mac using Word and it just didn't work exactly right. There were some differences which caused extra work and that is the last thing you need when writing a book. Word on Windows was the magic bullet.

There are two third party apps that I like which are not available on Windows. One is Rapidweaver which I use for the design of one of my websites. The other is Pixelmator which I use for graphics work that I used to do in Photoshop.

While I haven't found an exact replacement in Windows for Rapidweaver, I have found that Wordpress on my own domain can create a very nice presence. In essence I could live without Rapidweaver. I've also found that the combination of Lightroom on Windows and some tools available in Picasa pretty much cover what I do with Pixelmator on the Mac.

I have already written at length that I can live without iPhoto so what is left keeping me on the Mac? It certainly isn't iTunes.

It is actually pretty simple, I stay on the Mac because I make several DVDs a year. There is no platform that I have found that comes with "free" tools as well integrated as iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD.

It is not a perfect solution since it is not unusual to have a problem somewhere along the way, but it is better than anything that I have found in the Windows world. One of the first things that I looked at on my new Windows 8 system was the movie creation software. The Windows movie software has made huge strides and is fine for doing YouTube videos, but it is no iMovie.

And without the power of something like iMovie, there is not much sense in searching for something equivalent to iDVD in the Windows world. I've just done DVDs of our church's three different Christmas services. I cannot imagine doing them on anything but a Mac.

While I would love to have a new tower to continue with my iDVD projects, I suspect that I will have to get by with a Mac Mini.

December 13, 2012

Even a company like Apple which has a reputation for very reliable computers over the years, can still ship a bad product. I’ve been using Apple’s computers since August of 1982. I worked for the company for nearly twenty years and I have had access to a lot of Apple’s hardware over the years.

In October 2010, I purchased an I5 iMac which I have come to call my iLemon. It’s the first Apple computer that I have owned in over thirty years that I consider to be a true lemon. I’ve had some problems with computers over the years but none of the issues have rivaled what I’ve seen on this iMac.

While this is only one iLemon in three decades of Apples, I think buyers going into the holiday season should listen to the challenges that I have faced and carefully weigh them as they consider purchasing a new computer.

To many people Apple is a premium product on par with the best computers that are out there. Certainly with few exceptions, you end up paying more for an Apple product than you might for a product from another manufacturer. If like many Americans you live in a metro area, your Apple purchase gives you access to an Apple store and what can be for many people a very satisfying support infrastructure.

A little over six years ago, my wife and I made the decision to move to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast. It is an area of unbelievable beauty reminiscent of Atlantic Canada where we lived early in our lives. It is not a densely populated area, and as such is not really on Apple’s radar. The closest Apple Store is in a mall in Raleigh which you might reach in three hours if you hit the traffic right.

The distance to an Apple Store has not stopped me from using Macs, it has just made it more challenging. Just as we were moving to the coast in the summer of 2006, I bought a white MacBook. My Aluminum G4 laptop that I had purchased 21 months earlier had become unusable. The ribbon cable to the laptop monitor was malfunctioning. After evaluating repair costs, it made sense to buy the new Intel based MacBook. It was shipped to me and that fall I had a problem with it. After some pressure I was able to convince Apple to let me ship it to them for repair instead of making two round trips to Raleigh.

When we moved to the coast, my job required that I use Windows. While I put it off as long as possible, I ended up buying a HP laptop running Windows Vista. In was an inexpensive computer with a limit of only two gigs of ram. Vista was not much fun but in a couple of years when I ran out of hard drive space, I bought another HP laptop with an I7 running Windows 7. At the same time I replaced my wife’s ancient and deadly slow Mac laptop with an I5 HP also running Windows 7. We paid less than $1,500 in total for the two computers. At the time Apple was not even shipping laptops with I5s or I7s.

During much of this time, my white MacBook was a constant companion. When I went to work, I often carried the MacBook and my Vista laptop. Vista was a quagmire in my opinion and working on a Mac was an order of magnitude better. However, Microsoft learned from Vista and Windows 7 was a huge step forward. Not long after I bought my Windows 7 laptop, I quit carrying both laptops. Windows 7 proved to be very reliable, and I could do almost everything that I wanted to do on it except for work that I did on the web.

For that work I had my MacBook and a trusty dual G5 tower that I purchased in December 2004. In the fall of 2010, I started a project that required more horsepower than my four year old MacBook. The software I wanted to use would not work on my G5 so I made the reluctant decision to buy an I5 iMac since I had been priced out of Apple’s family of towers. At the time, the only way to get an I5 processor was to buy the 27” screen which barely fits on my desk. I ended up paying something over $1,800 for my iMac. It was slightly more than I paid for my dual G5 tower six years earlier.

The iMac had some quirks. It generated a lot of heat and I found the SDHC reader which was located below the DVD drive to be very inconvenient and something of a pain for someone like myself who takes a lot of pictures. As is often the case not long after I bought my iMac, Apple shipped a newer, cheaper one. I did take advantage of a $7.50 upgrade to the new iApps but more about that later.

If we fast forward about 15 months to the spring of 2012, the iMac began to exhibit some disturbing signs. It was taking well over fourteen minutes to boot Snow Leopard. I did some research and talked to some Apple folks and eventually decided that I was suffering from “Slow Snow Leopard.” I followed some homegrown remedies that I found on the web since Apple seemed to have no suggestions. I did get the boot time on the iMac cut down to reasonable time. Shortly after that my MacBook died after over five and one half years of faithful service. The iMac became the only computer on which some of my web design software would run.

About three months later, the iMac gave me a dire warning that I should copy all of my data to another hard drive, reformat my drive, and reinstall the operating system. I went one better and after coping the data to another drive, I did a complete clean install of Apple’s Lion operating system onto an external Firewire 800 drive. I ran that until I was comfortable with Lion. Then I formatted the internal drive and did another completely clean install except I moved up to Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest operating system.

When I say completely clean install, that means I went back to CDs or disk images for all my applications. The operating systems were installed from Apple’s app store. Starting at square one actually worked well except for a set of upgrade disks that I had purchased from Apple. For some reason Mountain Lion would not recognize the upgraded iPhoto. I solved the problem by spending another $14.95 at the Apple Store for a new purchase of iPhoto.

All this sort of worked for a couple of weeks. Being of a cautious nature, I only installed a completely new, small iPhoto library on the internal drive. In spite of that I started to have iPhoto library corruption problems. It wasn’t long before I figured out that the internal drive was dying. The computer quit booting from the drive so I upgraded my external drive to Mountain Lion and started running the computer off the external drive again. During all of this I wasn’t too worried about my data since I am a heavy user of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. I also had regular time capsule backups of my data.

At the same time I switched to the external drive I started have intermittent problems with the SDHC reader on the Mac. Sometimes it would read a card from my camera and sometimes not. I would often rotate my chair fifteen degrees, insert the same card in my Lenovo laptop, load the photos into Picasa, and export the ones that I wanted to my Google drive and then import them from Google drive to iPhoto on the Mac.

Surprisingly sometimes I could come back later in the day and the iMac would read the same card it had refused to read. It might read one or two of four cards or sometimes none of them. I also was having more trouble with iPhoto. I ended up reinstalling iPhoto from the Apple Store twice. For any of you who have done that, you know that it can take a few hours with a cable modem. For a while it seemed like the iMac was always downloading something from Apple.

Obviously by this time, I had a tremendous amount of time and energy expended in trying to fix my iMac. At this point I figured out that Apple in its wisdom designed recent iMacs so that you have to pull the LCD panel to access to the hard drive.

For someone who has been swapping hard drives in both desktop and laptops for years this was a bitter pill to discover.

Over the years I have been a big believer in trying to give companies a chance to stand behind their products and services. I’ve had significant luck with companies as diverse as Adobe and Toro in getting problems resolved so I decided to contact Apple to see if they would do something to make amends for what I consider an iLemon.

With a long career at Apple, I still have a few high level email addresses so I sent a note to someone high enough up the corporate tree to see if Apple was willing to stand behind their product. I wasn’t too surprised when I got a call on my cell phone the next day from someone in executive relations promising to help me resolve my problem.

I was traveling and naturally they wanted to trouble shoot the problem so I promised to contact them when I got back home. That was especially important since they couldn’t find my name attached to the serial number of any iMac. I was surprised since this iMac was my seventh one over the years. All the others were actually used by the ladies in the family.

That weekend and the following Monday, I spent much of my time running tests and doing screen shots. I formatted several types of SD cards with five different cameras to try to determine a pattern on my malfunctioning card reader. I also tried to document the strange problem I was having with photostream in iPhoto. I took all that information along with my system profile and sent it to my contact at executive relations. I told her that I would be available at my home phone number at 10 AM the next day.

At about 10:15 the next day, I noticed that I had transposed two digits in the backup cell phone number that I had given them to use if our home phone number was busy. I sent a new email with a corrected cell phone number even though I knew the executive relations lady had my correct cell number. A couple of minutes later I got a call from the system engineer saying that he had been waiting for the right phone number. It was a clue that he had not read the email that I sent the previous day or looked at any of the information I included.

I spent well over an hour on the phone with the Apple expert and let him download all sorts of stuff from my computer in the hopes that he could resolve some of my issues. He seemed to tire of the whole thing and we never got to the photostream issue. He promised to pass the information on to his engineering team and get back to me.

I waited a week to hear back from him and then sent a note to him and my executive relations contact. The next day I got a call back from my executive relations contact. All she said was that it had been determined that I had a loose wire on my SDHC reader, and I should take the system to my local service provider.

Many Mac users would not have the experience or the extra hardware to go through the effort that I did to fix my iMac. Some will say that I should have purchased Apple’s AppleCare extended warranty. I feel the same way about extended warranties on computers that I do about extended warranties on cars. I should not have to buy an extra warranty to get a product that is trouble free for a few years. Had I made a policy of buying Apple’s premium-priced, extended warranties on every Apple product that I have owned, I would be out several thousand dollars.

I was a little disappointed with the result of my Apple intervention. My suggestion to Apple was they send me a new MacMini and I would just take the iMac to electronics recycling. In the end I wasted a few more days of my time on what has proved to be a hopeless system. With a dead hard drive and a card reader with intermittent problems and Bluetooth that no longer works with my phone, spending money on this iMac is probably a waste. The shame is that all of this hardware worked fine at one time. None of this relates to the user not knowing how to get a computer to work. All of this is in Apple’s lap for creating a combination of hardware and software that turned out to be unreliable.

The whole experience did prompt me to order Adobe Lightroom 4 for my Windows laptop so I will no longer be tied to a couple of adjustments that I used in iPhoto for photos taken in a certain light.

The whole experience confirmed several of my thoughts about the new Apple. Number one is that what many of us said would happen to reliability when Apple switched to industry standard parts has happened. Apple is no longer the leader in reliability. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can read this reliability report published in February of 2012. Apple is in fourth place and way behind Lenovo which ranks number 1.

My second thought is that Apple often pushes design to the point that it impacts reliability. I was surprised to find that the hard drive on my iMac has a temperature sensor that shuts down the drive if the temperature gets too high. It is the first time I have been aware of a Mac outside of the Xserve that has a sensor like that. You can cook your hand on the top of my iMac at times. I have to believe that all the heat contributed to the early death of my hard drive.

Third, the Apple value proposition isn’t what it used to be. The two HP laptops which I bought for a total of less than $1,500 are still working great. As laptops they have had a harder life than my iMac which has never left its desktop. They’ll soon be three years old and are still functioning. The iMac never even made it two years. My original HP laptop that I bought over five years ago is also still working.

Fourth, just because you pay more for Apple, don’t expect better service especially if you live outside the major metro areas. I was really disappointed with my “trouble shooting” experience. The whole thing seemed to be aimed at minimizing what Apple would do to fix my problem. I’ve solved a lot of customer issues in my career, and never did I get on a call with a customer having a problem without reviewing all the information about the case before I talked to the customer. I also never left a customer with an unresolved problem.

On top of it all, after the call with the Apple expert, I got an email to me addressed “Dear Robert.” I have to say if you cannot even get my first name right, you probably aren’t going to solve any of my problems.

I have to compare my Apple experience to the phone call that I received from Adobe’s director of worldwide operations on a Sunday night telling me that he was sending me by FedEx a free copy of Dreamweaver to make up for problems I was having with an upgrade. Last summer I got a call from the executive assistant to the CEO of Toro telling me that they were sending me a free cable to replace the broken one on my lawn mower. I’ve been using Toro mowers for nearly 50 years. The cable might get me to continue to use them. Just a month ago, Nikon agreed to fix my Nikkor telephoto lens even though they could not find their copy of the extended warranty card. Unless they drop behind the technology curve, I will stick with my Nikon cameras.

I want Apple to be a premium brand willing to go the extra mile because I have paid premium prices for my Apple products. Unfortunately my experience even with some high level intervention shows that it is buyer beware with Apple just as it is with many other companies that sell products not nearly as expensive but sometimes more reliable than Apple products.

Apple’s latest refresh of the iMac line adds some more twists to the equation. You can no longer upgrade your own ram in an iMac and if you want a DVD drive you have to buy an external one. Apple’s RAM prices are about as expensive as the market will bear. From the review that I recently read, Apple has substituted a lower performing hard drive in the least expensive iMac. Based on my experience I cannot think that is good. Then in the ultimate convenience move, the SDHC reader is now on the back of the monitor. The only reason that I can see for an iMac being thinner and lighter is that it will be easier to carry into a mall Apple Store for repair.

It saddens me to say that in the nine months since spring I have invested more time in this iMac than I did keeping my Vista laptop running over a couple of years while I was calling Vista a quagmire.

I am going through a complete technology refresh on my desktop in the next twelve months. Likely there will be an Apple product on my desk, but it will not be an iMac. Whatever Mac I get will be here on probation since my recent Apple experiences have not been confidence building.

Actually I made the first purchase of my technology refresh on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I bought a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 8 for $999. My older Lenovo laptop is now hooked to an external monitor and acting as my main desktop system while I try to figure out how to replace my iMac. Here is a picture of my desktop.

I bought a new Lenovo because of the great experience with the previous one. It is the best laptop that I have used since the Powerbook G4 Titanium that I used as an Apple employee. So far I am very pleased with the Lenovo Yoga which is a combination ultra-book tablet with a touch screen. I’ll be sharing my Windows 8 experiences and the decisions I make on other purchases at ReadWrite Web.

You can read more about my Apple experience by checking out my recently published Kindle Book, The Pomme Company. Rumors of my book causing iPads running Kindle reader software to overheat are unfounded.